Fragale Filho on Increasing Judicial Transparency: When Brazilian Court TV Officially Meets YouTube

Professor Roberto Fragale Filho of Universidade Federal Fluminense Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia e Direito and Fundação Getúlio Vargas will present a paper entitled Increasing Judicial Transparency: When Brazilian Court TV Officially Meets YouTube, at ECEG 2010: The 10th European Conference on eGovernment, to be held 17-18 June 2010, at the University of Limerick, in Limerick, Ireland.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Created in 2002, Brazilian Court TV is an important mechanism for access to legal information, covering from academic debates to higher courts’ decisions. Its existence has made possible live broadcasting of Supremo Tribunal Federal (Brazilian Supreme Court) and the Conselho Nacional de Justiça (National Council of Justice) sessions and trials, which has contributed to the development of online communications by other Brazilian courts. This has brought up a shy and incipient debate about its impact on daily life of the courts. While some argue that such a practice improves transparency and accessibility in the Judiciary system, others argue that too much visibility exposes differences and confrontations – sometimes harsh ones – among its members, weakening the respectability of their decisions. A consensus is therefore far from being reached on the debate on the relevance of courts’ sessions (live) broadcasting. Recently, its official arrival on YouTube has pushed further such dispute. The creation of the YouTube official channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/stf?blend=1&ob=4) of the Supremo Tribunal Federal was justified as a way to increase its visibility and to improve the communication process with society, all of which was demanded by the Judiciary strategic planning. After all, the doubt stands: are we facing a new procedure that should provide greater transparency for the courts or does it only translate a repaginated and spectacular way of implementing judicial work? This paper, which is the first product of a research in progress, takes Brazilian Court TV as an investigation object and proposes to examine it from an interdisciplinary perspective between Communications and Law, Media and Courts of Justice. Thus, it is intended, at first, to recover the trajectory of Brazilian Court TV in order to understand its possible impact on access to information. Secondly, it is also intended to understand the meaning of its expansion and the use that is has made of new technologies. Establishing a sense to the increasing judicial transparency obtained through TV and web broadcasting is, in conclusion, the intention of this text.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.

Thanks to Professor Fragale Filho for sending the abstract.